Making Scenes
Page177(192 of 242)

I began this book by asking what was Balinese about the Balinese reggae, punk, and death metal scenes of the 1990s. The far-reaching implications of this appar- ently straightforward question have been key to discus- sions of the New Order regime’s fi nal years. They also have impelled studies of contemporary Balinese culture by showing that “localness” may be revived when people reject autochthonous modes of communality. Such rejec- tions produce cultural schisms and allow alternative soli- darities to develop. It is important to refrain from dichotomous assump- tions about the nature of political domination in New Order Indonesia, particularly in light of recent studies such as Carol Warren’s (1993), which re - veals the important political role of Balinese “subaltern reconstructions” of the national ideology, Pancasila, and Ariel Heryanto’s (1999b) accounts of how Indonesian people often only symbolically registered compliance with the New Order regime, thus practicing hyperobedience. If domination inevitably inspires perpetual resistance, hyperobedience implies that dominant discourses give people the very tools they need to subvert that domination. In hyperobedience, domination and resistance to it merge, confusing the traditional resistance/domination dialectic. The confl ation of these two dichotomous notions has been compounded in this book’s focus on the New Order’s fi nal years, in which discursive fl ux and contestation have underscored the importance of problematizing the notion of Balineseness and rendered the seemingly simple ques- tion with which my research began profoundly complex. Acknowledging such complexity is indeed elemental to any approach which views cultural identity as a process of perpetual negotiation and revision, and as a power struggle which implicates discourses of the global, the national, Conclusion